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" If you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. "

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" I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury. "

Zadie Smith

Early

You

Think

" We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. "

" Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count. "

Zadie Smith

Want

Own

" I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. I'm too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible. "

" My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world. "

" You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages. "

" I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do. "

" I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage. "

" Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control. "

" I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated. "

" The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students. "

" I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific. "

" I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction. "

Zadie Smith

Against

Battle

" There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. "

" It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange. "

Zadie Smith

Say

Strange

" I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me. "

" World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?' "

" It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. "

" People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them. "

" Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well. "

" I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to. "

" My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying. "

" It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.' "

Zadie Smith

Knowing

Nothing

" I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame. "

" I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around. "

Zadie Smith

Books

Keep

" Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That's a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it's not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers. "

" Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. "

" Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied. "

" Young people understand the world. They should be listened to on matters of politics and world organization. But they know nothing of their own lives. "

" Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed. "